Man, Oh Man!

Mario Testino on the masculine, the erotic, and getting Josh Hartnett into lipstick and lashes.

Prompt any fashion fan for their favorite Mario Testino shot and the responses come fast and furious: Princess Diana, tragic and perfectly placid in 1997; tawny, luminous Gisele climbing out of a Rolls-Royce Phantom with a purple fur stole in 2007; Kate Moss, perched on a sink, lipstick in hand, in 2006. And while Testino’s unrivaled ability to capture feminine wiles has surely produced some of his most iconic pictures, to a certain extent they’ve also overshadowed his prolific output of other sorts, commanding all the attention—“like a beautiful woman walking into a room,” as the lensman himself tells it. Enter Sir, Taschen’s epic (and epically handsome) new tome celebrating Testino’s images of men from the past three decades. A limited edition of 1,000 copies, between its covers you’ll find an expansive vision of the masculine allure, from Bowie to Beckham, and with plenty of ground in between.

We sat down with the famed photographer (in town to accept the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award) to talk tattoos, Los Angeles, and what it means to Mario to be a man.

Over the course of your career, have you seen a significant shift in the portrayal of men in photography?

Not only in photography, in the portrayal of men, full stop. I grew up in a society where you were supposed to fit, whereas today men are supposed to be. They can be anything they want. I’ll give you a stupid example: Tattoos in my generation were a sign that you were a criminal. They weren’t a sign of coolness or of a point of view. Today, everybody has a tattoo. In my time, to wear an earring for a man was shocking. I moved to London in ’76 and of course dyed my hair pink and had two earrings on one side. I went back to Peru and it was quite a shock! I think people like David Bowie were the precursors of this changing of opinion. He could wear a dress and full makeup, but he was married and had a child. It was the mentality [previously] if you did that, you probably were gay. I’ve never been one to like that definite opinion of anything; I quite like the ambivalence. And today, when you think about it, David Beckham, for instance—the father of four kids, covered in tattoos, in earrings, in style. We have all embraced reality, in the sense that we don’t necessarily have to only do things the way that people want them to be done, but we can just be ourselves.

In fashion before, there used to be a trend, and if you didn’t follow that trend, you were out of fashion. Today, you go to a fashion show, there are a thousand trends. It’s a sign of our times, where you can be whatever you want to be. There’s long, there’s short, there’s…There’s no more, “Oh, the miniskirt is in and everybody’s doing it.” No, that was before, when we didn’t have [the] possibility of the freedom that we have today.

So there’s more of this fluidity in fashion, and in the culture on the whole. When working with your male subjects—like that photo of Josh Hartnett wearing lipstick and false lashes—is there ever any hesitance to push traditional boundaries?

Oh, for sure, there is a lot of hesitance. But some people want to do it themselves, almost like a challenge. Josh, for instance, he’s an actor, and actors are supposed to be prepared to do any role, because, basically, it’s not you that you’re portraying, it’s a character. I knew that I wanted to do lipstick for the story, just like smudged lipstick. And he said, “Well, maybe we can do the eyes as well. Why not?” I sort of like this idea that they challenge how far we can go with a persona. I think that some actors become very conscious of what they’re up to, or they have a moment and they’d rather not go anywhere else. But others—you almost have to catch them in between characters, when they feel free to do things. I can tell you that not all of them react to that. Some of them go, “No, because my publicist…” I’m not interested in those people, personally. You don’t see them much in the book.

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You mentioned Bowie and David Beckham. Is there anyone else today who you find to be an especially compelling image of masculinity?

Tom Brady. Not because of him being masculine, but because he’s a family man—wife, kids, responsible. That gave me a sense of masculinity, because today you cannot say masculinity is expressed by a look. I think that you see it more through people’s actions.

How do you see these photos relating to the vision of masculinity from your pictures of traditional Peruvian costume?

Those photographs are all about hanging on to something that was determined many, many centuries ago. I’m very attached to the imagery of tradition, to the imagery of cities that are traditional, like Seville, to sports like bullfighting, or to the Catholic Church—I am attracted to all of those things that are to do with the lingering idea of something. And I think masculinity today exists that way, but I think more and more it’s being challenged by new perceptions and new means, because a man today has to live with the reality of today. He can no longer live with the reality of 100 years ago. The world’s changing so fast. Unless you are prepared to adapt every day, then you have a problem, because the world’s not stopping. And I think now more than ever, it’s going a lot faster than it ever has done. Our references of taste, let alone anything else, change [snaps fingers] like that; we get invaded by things. The Kardashians, for instance, changed the way of seeing for many people. Look what happened to Kim Kardashian. She changed concepts of sexuality—how she presents to the world rocked many people’s boats. At the moment there is a big interest in Los Angeles. Everybody says Los Angeles is happening. Why? Because in Los Angeles, individuality is very big, because people live in secluded bubbles. People don’t walk around. They’re very insular, and that allows for people to be whatever they want.

In terms of the physicality of the book and the design of the book, what was most important to you?

Doing exhibitions, I realized that some of those pictures that work in a narrative don’t necessarily work alone. So I started learning how to make pictures that stand on their own. It’s very different to put a picture in a magazine than to hang it on a wall. The lifespan of a magazine is maybe half an hour, and the lifespan of something on the wall is maybe 10 years. I wanted to create that with the book: Make the pictures live alone and speak for themselves. They’re all about trying to define men in general. I did the cover of the book with a cloth, to give it a sort of elegance. Then you open it and it has this picture of a guy touching his crotch. It’s like, “Bang! I’m a man!” And then we put this metal cover because I thought I quite like the mix—we can be soft and nice, and you can be tough at the same time. Why does one have to choose?

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Has seeing this huge chunk of your work of this stripe led you to any new realizations?

[As] photographers, we have to find our own identity, our own voice, our own vocabulary. And my question all the time is whether this vocabulary is limited, like our own vocabulary that goes from A to Zed, or whether this vocabulary can carry on growing. And to me, I hope that it carries on growing. I just turned 60 last year, and before, people used to retire at my age, you know? I am the opposite. I’m insatiable. I work six days a week and travel on the seventh day. Looking at all this work makes me realize, “My God, maybe I still have things to say!”

Most photographers go and photograph something that they see, that exists, and that somebody else has created—they document it. Sports photographers go and photograph sports, photojournalists photograph manifestations. [But] fashion photographers have to create what they’re going to photograph. We have to go into the thought and build it up, get a girl, get a guy, get a situation, get the house, get the decor. It’s the meaning of [the word] photography: “writing with light.”

Could you speak a little bit about your vision of the erotic, and how that varies from male to female subjects, if it does?

To me, it doesn’t really [differ]. I grew up when a woman was one thing and a man was one thing. And the liberation of women has brought a lot of equality to the man, in the emancipation of the man as a bulldog; we can also be soft. It’s interesting, because sometimes I maybe push the men a little bit more than the women, because it’s a little bit less expected. But at the end of the day, somebody taking their clothes off is somebody taking their clothes off. It can be a woman or a man, we all look!